New Books and Author Entries

ISBN 978-0-9807418-1-0

Blurb from the Book

In Australia’s 1930s, the Sinclair name is respectable and influential, yet the youngest son Rowland - an artist - has a talent for scandal.

Even with the unemployed lining the streets, Rowland lives in a sheltered world... of wealth, culture & impeccable tailoring with the family fortune indulging his artistic passions & friends… a poet, a painter & a brazen sculptress.

Mounting political tensions fuelled by the Great Depression take Australia to the brink of revolution. Rowland Sinclair is indifferent to the politics… until a brutal murder exposes an extraordinary & treasonous conspiracy.

“The real enemy is Labor’s Jack Lang and the Communist hordes into whose hands he plays… What say I introduce you to some chaps?”

“What chaps?”

“Right thinking men. Loyalists who love this country… Rowland, I think you could be moving with the wrong crowd.”

Technorati Tags: A Few Right Thinking Men New Authors or Books Australia Sulari Gentill Crime Fiction Historical Sydney 2010 Pantera Press Rowland Sinclair

About the Author

Sulari set out to study astrophysics, ended up graduating in law, and later abandoned her legal career to write books instead of contracts. When the mood takes her, she paints, although she maintains that she does so only well enough to know that she should write.

She grows French black truffles on her farm in the foothills of the Snowy Mountains of NSW, which she shares with her young family and several animals... the farm, not the truffles.

Sulari was recently offered a Varuna Fellowship. She was commended in the Fellowship of Australian Writers’ 2008 Jim Hamilton Award, long-listed for the Hachette/QLD writers Centre Australian Manuscript Development Program for fiction writers, and shortlisted for the 2008 New Holland Publishers and NSW Writers Centre Genre Fiction Award.

She has been writing for a few years, but thinking about it most of her life. She’s pretty sure now that writing is what’s she’s supposed to do.

Website & Links

Bibliography

• A Few Right Thinking Men

Technorati Tags: New Authors or Books Sulari Gentill

ISBN 978-1-74166-814-8

Blurb from the Book

Miriam Caine is dining with her son in an up-market restaurant when she bursts into flames.

The restaurant's manager, ex-cop Troy Berrigan, is first to Miriam's aid, but she later dies of her injuries.  When police find accelerants on the victim, attention is turned to their whistleblowing former colleague, the only person close enough to have set her on fire.

Technorati Tags: New Authors or Books Watch the World Burn Australia Leah Giarratano Crime Fiction Police Procedural Psychological Suspense Sydney 2010 Jill Jackson Random House Australia

ISBN 978-1-4050-3962-8

Blurb from the Book

King of the Cross is a dazzling novel that explores the criminal world of Jacob Mendoza: legendary Godfather of Kings Cross and for more than four decades, Australia's most powerful and notorious crime figure.  Now in his eighties, Mendoza believes it's time to record his epic life story - although finding a competent writer is never easy.  As Mendoza unfolds his seductive story of thugs and drugs, murders and mysteries, bikers, bent cops and girls, girls, girls, it emerges that he's not the only one with a past.  And the memoir takes shape, other more terrifying criminals are circling the kingdom that Mendoza built.

Technorati Tags: King of the Cross New Authors or Books Australia Mark Dapin Crime Fiction Sydney 2009 Pan MacMillan Australia

About the Author

Mark Dapin moved to Australia in the late 1980s. He is the author of Strange Country and King of the Cross, has been editor in chief of ACP's men's magazines, and a hugely popular columnist for Fairfax's Good Weekend. He lives in Sydney with his partner and two children.

Website & Links

Bibliography

• Strange Country
• King of the Cross

Technorati Tags: New Authors or Books Mark Dapin

ISBN  978-0-670-07371-9

Blurb from the Book

Huge floodwaters have engulfed a remote Victorian goldfield, reducing the prospect of digging up a fortune from very slim to impossible, and adding disease to the many possibilities of sudden death in harsh conditions. As sickness starts to take its toll and calls mount for the rescue of diggers stranded by the raging torrent, Sergeant Niall Kennedy must try to keep order in a place where frictions can become murderous. Does a suspiciously abandoned tent suggest there has already been a killing? And why has Mosquito Creek's erratic Commissioner Stanfield drafted in special troopers behind Kennedy's back?

In a new country where everyone's past has a question mark, asking too many questions is dangerous. But how else can you get to the truth?

Mosquito Creek is a rare treat - historical fiction that brilliantly evokes the hardships of early Australia, and a crime novel in a setting where crime touches upon everyone and everything. A priceless relic from the Old Country deepens the mystery and adds a mythic quality to the events unfolding in this isolated settlement. An Australian Deadwood.

Technorati Tags: Mosquito Creek New Authors or Books Australia Robert Engwerda Crime Fiction Historical Victorian Goldfields 2010 Penguin

About the Author

Robert Engwerda was born in the Netherlands, his family later settling in northern Victoria. His occupations have included fruit picker, factory worker, clerk, secondary school teacher and educational publisher. His first novel, Backwaters, was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 2005, and in 2007 he won a place in the Australian Society of Authors' highly regarded mentorship program. Robert currently lives in Melbourne.

Website & Links

Bibliography

• Backwaters
• Mosquito Creek

Technorati Tags: New Authors or Books Robert Engwerda Australia Penguin

ISBN  978-0-646-50382-0

Blurb from the Book

Doctor Jack Nugent never liked looking at dead people and he hated touching them.  In spite of this, he acquired detailed knowledge as to what happened to human remains.  In the small community of Utopia, in the middle of Australia, he'd picked up skills he simply never could have learned by staying in New York:  Aboriginal ritual killings hardly ever happened there.

Perhaps it's also worth repeating the author's note:

This is a work of fiction.

There is a real place named Utopia, it's situated in the red-desert centre of Australia.  This story is not about that place, nor is it about any real people.  I found the irony irresistable:  imagine naming a place called Utopia, a place so impoverished, so desolate.

Technorati Tags: Murder in Utopia New Authors or Books Australia Philip McLaren Crime Fiction 2009 Cockatoo Books

ISBN  978-1-405-03976-5

Blurb from the Book

A serial killer is stalking young, female strappers. No one knows who it is, why he's doing it, or who is likely to be next. The police and the race clubs seem powerless to do anything. The women are terrified and the union is threatening to go on strike and close down the entire racing industry unless security can be guaranteed and the killer caught.

Meanwhile, John Punter's got problems closer to home to worry about. There's a protection racket afoot and his restaurant Gino's is getting lent on. Then there's his new girlfriend Maxine. Everyone says she's trouble. She's the socialite daughter of a shock-jock announcer; the biggest rating name in radio and a major client of his father's stable. And he's made it clear he doesn't want Punter hanging around...

Back at the track, as the body count mounts, Punter finds himself involved in a desperate race against time to find a crazed killer.

Technorati Tags: New Authors or Books Silk Chaser Australia Peter Klein Crime Fiction Horse Racing 2010 John Punter Pan MacMillan Australia

ISBN  9781863256230

Blurb from the Book

Rome is bathed in blood as the Emperor Tiberius is tormented by drug-fuelled terrors of treason. The innocent are butchered while the guilty do evil in darkness. None are guiltier than the Emperor's devoted and deluded 'son', Sejanus.

In this city of poison three beautiful women are locked in a lethal rivalry…

Agrippina. Driven mad with grief, her obsession with revenge for her murdered husband imperils the lives of her children.

Apicata. Robbed of her eyes and embittered in her heart, she schemes in the shadows to empower the husband who despises her.

Livilla. Sensual and sly, she is gripped by a lust for a lover as deadly as he is desirable.

Three women. One goal. Who will be Empress of Rome?

Moving stealthily among them is Iphicles, arch schemer and slave, whose haunted heart is lightened by the eunuch Lygdus, his willing apprentice in murder. With paralysed Livia now a helpless captive to her slave, it is the repellent brat Little Boots' turn to profit from prophecy. But as Iphicles' deadly plan to enthrone Little Boots unfolds, Livia struggles secretly towards recovery with the help of the sorceress Martina.

Rome is a nest of vipers, and Livia, the one true Empress of Rome, is hell-bent on wreaking her vengeance…

Technorati Tags: Nest of Vipers New Authors or Books Australia Luke Devenish Crime Fiction Historical Ancient Rome 2010 Empress of Rome Random House Australia